Yankee Air Museum Wings & Wheels

Yankee Air Museum, now formally the Michigan Flight Museum, sits on the grounds of Willow Run Airport, a site inseparable from American airpower in the Second World War. The institution grew out of the Yankee Air Force, founded in 1981 to safeguard Michigan’s aviation heritage and, in particular, the legacy of the vast Ford Willow Run bomber plant that once produced B-24 Liberators on an industrial scale. Its story is marked by both loss and persistence: a devastating hangar fire in 2004 destroyed aircraft, artifacts, and the museum’s library, yet volunteers managed to save key airframes and quickly set rebuilding plans in motion. The museum later reopened in a repurposed aviation training building on D Street and developed the Robertson Education Center within a 1938 schoolhouse that had served as the wartime officers’ club. Ongoing efforts to preserve a section of the original Albert Kahn–designed bomber plant reflect a broader commitment to interpreting not only aircraft, but the engineering, industrial organization, and workforce that underpinned American air operations in the mid-20th century.